What do you guys think about this carbon tax that's coming in effect? Should we pay for it? I think.... well, we should pay because we do use a lot of pollution. It's only fair that we should pay for it. However, the money gained from this should go (technically speaking) into fixing the problem.
What are your thoughts?
[H2]What is a carbon tax?[/H2] A carbon tax is an example of a what's called a Pigovian tax, as advocated by British economist Arthur Pigou (1877-1959).
When an activity has a negative social cost, such as pollution, Pigou argued that it should be taxed. That, according to his theory, provides an incentive to stop the social harm and move to more positive alternatives — a similar idea to "sin taxes" on products such as alcohol and tobacco.
So the idea of a carbon tax is to turn people and businesses away from "bad" fossil fuels and toward "good" clean alternatives. Under some models, it can also provide funds to help combat the wider effects of climate change, with the idea that the "polluter pays" for green initiatives.
In practice, a carbon tax can be:
[UL] [LI]an across-the-board levy on all fuels based on CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions. [LI]applied to just the businesses that produce carbon emissions, leaving it up to them whether or not to pass costs along to consumers [LI]directly levied on consumers. [/LI][/UL] Under a "revenue-neutral" carbon tax, any levies that would be extracted from a particular sector — say, transportation — would be returned in the form of a subsidy or tax break.
The tax level is often calculated in terms of dollar cost per tonne of emissions. This can then be translated into a cost on the fuel that emits the greenhouse gases (e.g.: 10 cents a litre on gasoline).
[A href="http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/06/18/f-carbon-tax.html"]Read More[/A]
